1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is addressed to the area of paper document transporting including remittance processing, wherein documents are read either electrically or optically and/or subsequently checked by an operator and finally encoded.
2. Discussion of Background
Document processing involves the processing of remittance documents which may involve a bill and a check in a typical transaction. A customer receives a bill in the mail and returns a portion of that bill with a check. The processing of this returned bill and the returned check involve several steps beginning with the opening of the envelope at the document processing center.
The bill which is sent to the customer and which is subsequently returned by the customer to the document processing center, usually contains a line to be filled in by the customer indicating the amount of payment. The bill also contains the required/minimum payment indication and the total due to pay off the account. These indications of required payment and total amounts due are encoded in the bill usually in a form which can be read by an optical character reader (OCR) and/or a magnetic reader (MICR, Magnetic Ink Character Reader). As a part of normal document processing either one or both of these indications are read by the appropriate machines along the system path after the envelope is opened and the documents are removed from the envelope and inserted into a hand or automatic feeder. Once the feeding operation and the subsequent reading operation have begun, the bill is read by the machine and fed to a view station where an operator may visually confirm the relationship between the written amount of payment on the bill and the amount of the check accompanying the bill or perform any other corrections required. While the bill is being fed and read by the machine, the operator inspects the check visually and keys the amount from the check. The microcomputer controlling the machine compares the keyed amount from the check with the data read from the bill and makes the decision to accept the check or not. If the check is drawn for an acceptable amount, then it is encoded and passed on through the system. The bill likewise is released from the view station and passed through the system. If the check is unacceptable either through being in an unacceptable amount, unsigned or otherwise not acceptable or questionable, or if the bill is unreadable or otherwise unacceptable then the bill remains in the view station and the operator attempts to reconcile the transaction. If the reconcilliation is successful, the transaction is processed normally, as above, if not, the (bill and check) are sorted to an exception pocket or pockets.
Any number of odd situations, including the payment by means of two or more checks which require further analysis by the operator, may hold up the entire system and makes the continuous operation difficult or impossible.
Another difficult area of document processing is a transaction having a plurality of checks accompanying a deposit document. This type of system is of course used in document processing for banking systems. In many instances a transaction may consist of a deposit document as well as several checks. In the instance of depositing from a large account, as in a business deposit, the document may be accompanied by a large number of checks. In the present document processing systems the deposit document would be read and compared with a sum obtained from each of the deposited checks. This operation is usually performed on what is known as a proof machine and the actual operation involves an operator inspecting each check in the batch, indexing the dollar amount of the check into the proof machine keyboard and then dropping the check into the document transport mechanism where it is encoded with the indexed amount and the backside of the check is endorsed with audit-trail information. In the meantime the proof machine also accumulates a sum of the dollar amounts of each check and prints this sum at completion of the operation.
It can be easily seen that if there are problems with any of the checks or if there is an improper addition, the entire batching process must be stopped and furthermore the previous checks have already been encoded so that it is difficult to regain the entire batch for special processing.
The remittance processing operation can be operated in either the stop and go mode or in the streaming mode. The operator visually confirms the relationship between the written amount of payment on the bill and the amount of the check and the keying from the check triggers the machine to accept the check. In the prior art systems, speed was either sacrificed initially so that each item needed to be passed through in sequence upon the control of the operator in a stop and go mode or a continuous stream was fed at a predetermined time interval which saved time but caused serious problems when unusual circumstances required the operator to take steps requiring examination or further action on one of the particular items which required a complete stoppage of the feeding process.
Another important and recent development in the document processing system is the capturing of the image of the documents prior to operator intervention so that the operator views not the document but an image of the document. The advantages of this type of system are of course the ability to manipulate the documents once the images have been captured so that there is an increased ease in the viewing of the documents. The drawback to the imaging system is the separation of the document from the image of the document so that when an operator views an image of the document and there is a mistake or action needs to be taken, the document is difficult to find or has already passed down the stream of processing.